The proliferation of integrated circuits has placed increasing demands on the design of digital systems included in many devices, components, and architectures. The number of digital systems that include integrated circuits continues to steadily increase and may be driven by a wide array of products and systems. Added functionalities may be implemented in integrated circuits in order to execute additional tasks or to effectuate more sophisticated operations in their respective applications or environments.
In the context of processing, present generation embedded systems have stringent requirements on performance and power consumption. Many embedded systems employ digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms for communications, image processing, video processing etc, which can be computationally intensive. These algorithms each include and implicate any number of processing operations. The required processing operations (e.g. multiplication, addition, shift, etc.) is tantamount to any proposed processing optimization. Moreover, it is the operations that dictate the demands, capacity, and capabilities of any given system architecture or configuration. Accordingly, the ability to reduce these operations to achieve optimal processing provides a significant challenge to system designers and component manufacturers alike.